Welcoming Rackspace as Xen Project Advisory Board member

We’re excited to welcome Rackspace as our newest Xen Project Advisory Board member today. Since becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project about a year ago, we’ve announced four new members, including ARM, NetApp and Verizon Terremark.

Rackspace has used Xen Project virtualization software since 2006. The company’s public cloud business supports hundreds of thousands of Xen virtual machines and millions of snapshots with the software. Global deployments aren’t slowing down anytime soon, according to Paul Voccio, Senior Director of Software Development at Rackspace. New machines ship in weekly, while new clusters come online every few days, according to Voccio.
“Since we’ve been working with Xen on a much deeper level than in the past, we thought the time was right to contribute back to the project,” he said. “Becoming a member is the first step in that process, which will allow us to become more involved with the project.”
Speaking to us from last week’s OpenStack Summit Atlanta, Voccio and his colleague Antony Messerli, a Principal Engineer, are already aggressively promoting Xen as a type 1 hypervisor within the open cloud community his company helped create.
Because Rackspace runs OpenStack and XenServer, which contain both the Xen Project Hypervisor and Xen Project XAPI, the two technologies are battle proven to work together in large-scale environments right out of the box, said Messerli. OpenStack fully supports XAPI integration with the Xen hypervisor as well as open source XenServer.
Rackspace has also recently worked with the CentOS community to get the Xen Project hypervisor tested and stabilized on CentOS.
“Currently we’re working with Citrix and the open source community to get XAPI tested and working on distributions like Debian and CentOS so that it’s easier for users that need to run their own distribution to consume Xen and OpenStack,” said Messerli.
Messerli said he believes Xen Project technology remains relevant because it has proven its reliability and stability through the years running some of the largest public clouds and varying workloads. Its high performance and security for multi-tenancy are critical for cloud computing. Moving forward, Voccio identified some near-term priorities where he hopes his team can add value.
“We’ll be looking to make performance improvements related to networking and disk I/O, as well as improving support for more distributions,” Voccio said. “We also plan to work with upstream Xen projects to establish a better testing path.”
Later this month Rackspace’s UK office will host a sold-out Xen Project Hackathon, May 29 and May 30 in London. Always an open and welcoming “host,” Rackspace has supported the Xen Project community by hosting our web site, wiki, mailing lists, blog and other services since 2011. The following links provide more information on Rackspace’s use of Xen Project technology:

• Why Rackspace Uses Xen
• Scaling Xen on Rackspace Cloud Servers